Going to head off to my 3rd surgery on the 24th of this month so i thought i'd tell a little story...

On January 20th of 2009 i had a little bit of a crash. I was snowboarding and happened to be tucking down the mountain. The ground was getting choppy so i started to slow down to stop and wait for the people behind me. Right after i turned to face down the hill to brake i hit a small stump buried under the powder which forced me into a fast roll and i landed on the base of my neck. I folded in half, well more like a third, and my chin touched my stomach. The force of it snapped my sternum but for some reason, of which the doctors nor anyone can figure out, didn't break my back. After the initial break and pain it ebbed away and i figured it was alright....which was stupid obviously. It was the end of the day so i headed home and forgot about it. That was also the last time i had gone snowboarding that year because i didnt have time again after that. Once i started soccer though i ended up finding out just how painful it is. It might have actually started to heal before i started soccer, but then i probably re-broke it in soccer. Needless to say i got a CT and they found it was broken. Then the stupid ass doctors decided it would be best to wait 6 months for surgery, JUST in case it started to heal. When it didnt heal, and was officially a non-union, there was only one place in the northwest that wanted to deal with the damn thing. So i went to seattle in November and had my first surgery, which sucked. Blablabla second surgery to replace screws, blabla stupid fucking doctors neglected to replace all the screws which were too long so now they are rubbing and scratching my heart. Which is sort of like having a water balloon in an earthquake surrounded by screws. Anywhoo, now heading into the third surgery i would say the moral of the story is.....uhm....don't break yourself at inopportune times?

I spent over 5 and a half hours in the ut3 editor making a sniping minigame. Got it all finished and polished up. I cooked it, everything seemed to be going right, despite the editor crashing every 3 mother f*cking minutes (Bleeped as i'm not sure about moddb's censorship policy). Then i go to open it up in game and it crashes. I think, "well this is pretty damn normal, i suppose i'll try it in the editor." So i go back to this damn editor and open it up. The level is blank, nothing is inside, nada, z-mother f*cking-ilch. So i say, "shit, guess i have to cook it again." So i go back to the uncooked version only to find, THE F*CKER ISN"T THERE EITHER!!!! WTF!!! WHY THE F*CK WOULD IT ERASE THAT AS WELL??? so i go to my backups which are saved in a different spot and named differently, AND THEY ARE GONE TOO WTF, I ASK YOU, WTF???!?!

Is there some f*cking little demon inside the editor just waiting to dissapoint me and seeing that i didn't give up after numerous fucking (screw the bleeps) crashes it decided to erase my mother fucking work???? WTF!!!

I've finally figured out how to make flickering lights using the fluorescent light in the LT_Lights package that came with UT3! I've gone through multiple tutorials, including an overwhelmingly brief Hourences tutorial, and only figured it out after i decided to discover my own way to do it. My main problem was the inablility to duplicate cooked materials, no freaking idea why, but i eventually manually went and made an exact copy of the cooked material which i then made my instance material out of. I ended up using matinee to control both the light point and the material instance, it is more time consuming but it also allows me to create a more custom flickering light effect that is more realistic. I will create a number of different flickering matinees which i will hook up to different lights so no 2 lights in a room will ever be flickering the same way. I've also solved, well hopefully, the problem of making flashlights in a UT3 mod when the game does not render the black (without light) areas of the map. I merely put in two skylights at different angles with an extremely low brightness and only on static and bsp channels which forces the game to load the dark areas, while they still remain dark (at least until you shine a flashlight on them). I've also found out what a pain (literally) it is to have a broken sternum so i'm holed up in my house with nothing to do but figure shit out like this :D

-Update

I've also figured out how to do custom cinematics through matinee so we don't have to pre-render them outside of the game. This is going to help production time IMMENSLY, and if anyone wants to know how just PM me :)

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